


keeping the stars apart

by foxmagpie



Series: stunner [2]
Category: Good Girls (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Bittersweet Ending, Exes, F/M, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:42:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29507793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxmagpie/pseuds/foxmagpie
Summary: Four months after their breakup, Beth decides to visit Rio.
Relationships: Beth Boland/Rio
Series: stunner [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2167575
Comments: 37
Kudos: 95





	keeping the stars apart

**Author's Note:**

> I had no plans to write a follow-up for this story. And then _someone_ was like, "I'm gonna give her a prompt to roast her for the Ann Arbor debacle," and then _I_ was full of spite and like, "You want a follow-up? I'll give you a follow-up!" And then I wrote this in a few hours. I apologize in advance. Please don't hate me.

It takes her four months and sixteen days to break.

Beth tries to move on, she does. She tucks the necklace he got her into a sock at the back of her drawer—hides the copy of _1984_ under her mattress—throws away all the notes he ever wrote her except one (not that she needs to keep it—she knows what it says. Knows it by heart. Not just the words—a transcribed e.e. cummings poem that he’d analyzed in English class that day—and not just the message he’d added at the bottom about how it made him think of her, how everything did—but the exact contours of his letters, the way he pressed too hard when he wrote his E’s and how he wrote too fast so his lowercase R’s looked like V’s. She’d memorized it all).

None of it works, though. She floats through the hallways at her new school like she’s barely in her body and she sits in her next classes and listens to her teachers drone on about theorems and metaphors and the rule of thirds and she thinks of him. How he’d tug at the hem of her pajamas and tell her they were ugly but his eyes would be warm and full and bright like he didn’t mean it. How he’d twirl her hair around his finger while she told him about her day, and how he’d gently pull on it when she’d stop in the middle of her sentences, reminding her to finish. How she’d hear his heartbeat speed up and go erratic when she had her head on his chest and she’d trace her finger along the waistband of his basketball shorts. How it’d do the same thing when all she did was link her fingers with his. 

At her new school, boys ask her out and she says yes. She holds their hand in darkened movie theaters and she lets them put their arms around her when they teach her how to mini golf and she goes to the end-of-year dance with one. All the things he wanted to do with her.

But when the new boys try to kiss her she turns away and says, “I’m sorry.” Eventually, she starts telling them that she can’t go out. That she has a boyfriend.

Who? they ask, and she says that they wouldn’t know him.

Her new friend Ruby watches her curiously and one night at a sleepover Beth tells her about him in the dark. Says his name for the first time out loud since she said it directly to him. It tastes good in her mouth. 

Ruby says she should go visit him. That love conquers everything. That it’s not even really that far.

But Beth knows better.

She knows exactly how bad it will hurt. Remembers how she had ached to _almost_ have him, how she barely survived on the consolation of getting to see him pass by her in the hall, to touch her pinky to his on the couch, to only get to kiss him once a week after midnight.

Lola aside, how could she give herself a taste and not expect to starve on the crumbs? 

She had responsibilities here. A job she worked on the weekends to help pay the bills, for one. Annie, for two. And they’d sold her car so they could have enough money to make the move in the first place.

So what would she get? His voice on the phone, reminding her of how far away he was? A visit once a month, if she was lucky and could both borrow the car and get a shift covered and Annie didn’t grow out of her last pair of shoes too fast so she could get away with a smaller paycheck?

A voice in the back of her mind whispers that it would be better than _this,_ but every time she picks up the phone, she stops herself.

She remembers what half-measures did to him, too.

So she buries those feelings just like she’d buried their keepsakes.

* * *

And then one Friday, she wakes up and she’d dreamt of him and it was so vivid she swears she can still feel his calloused hands on her skin. Can taste his cinnamon toothpaste on her tongue.

It’s his birthday, she realizes, flipping open her planner in first period. There’s a doodle of a river filling up the box—a hidden R mutated to look like a flower. There are a few other decoy doodles littering the page, from back when she thought she’d still be hiding what they were from Lola. When she thought they could get away with that forever. 

He’s sixteen today. And he’s old enough to drive now.

It’s almost enough to make her break. She doesn’t though. She knows deep down that not enough has changed, that she’ll still be busy on weekends with her job and on weekdays with Annie. 

In third period, though, Mrs. Carmichael hands out a stack of papers. When Beth reads the small, perfectly typed letters on the blank white page, her vision blurs. It looks different. It looks _wrong_.

“We’re starting our poetry unit today,” Mrs. Carmichael announces. “Who can tell me what they know about e.e. cummings?”

Beth’s heart races and her hand shoots up into the air, but when she’s called on she announces she’s not feeling well and she’d like to go to the nurse. Mrs. Carmichael sighs and fills out a green slip, but Beth tosses it in the first garbage can she sees in the hallway and she walks straight out of the double doors and she gets on a bus that takes her down to the depot, and there she pulls out all the money she has in her wallet (not much) and she places it on the counter and she buys a ticket to Detroit. 

She gets a window seat and the sun shines on her face as she watches the buildings and then the fields flick by and she feels warm.

 _Whatever a sun will sing is always you,_ she thinks, because she knows the poem by heart.

Two more transfers and then she’s there, on his street, and she’s suddenly overwhelmed—over seeing him, over popping up out of the blue, over how he might react, she doesn’t know. 

But she checks her watch and it’s still early and as long as everything’s stayed the same, he’ll be the only one home. Lola will be at dance and his parents will be at work, and Rio will be in his bedroom, maybe smoking a joint or building a model plane or reading a book. Waiting for his mom to come home and make him tacos al pastor with elote (what she makes every year on his birthday, Beth knows) and for Mick and Dags to come over to celebrate.

They’ll have a bit of time alone before—

Before whatever comes next.

Sucking in a breath, she shifts her weight, lifts her hand, and raps her knuckles on the door.

It feels like an eternity. The silence stretches, the sun beats on the back of her neck, and she can feel a trickle of sweat pooling at the base of her skull—but in reality, it’s probably only a few seconds before she can hear the whine of the floor just outside his bedroom door, the thud of footsteps getting closer, the sound of the door swinging open and then—

“Fuck.”

Beth blinks her eyes open (when had she closed them?) and there he is, standing in front of her. Hand still settled loosely on the door handle, mouth slightly agape, brows raised in quiet shock. A little taller, she thinks. But otherwise? Otherwise, exactly the same. 

“Hi,” she says shyly, and it seems to snap him back to reality, to convince him that she’s not a mirage or a dream or a hallucination because he exhales, smiles, and says, “‘Ey.”

“Hi,” she says again, because apparently every word she’s ever known falls out of her head.

“You’re—here. Fuck. You’re _here."_

She laughs. “I am.”

“You’re back?”

Her face pinches and she shakes her head quickly. “No—”

“Oh.”

“I just—” She swallows. “Happy birthday.”

He smiles again, and his teeth are bright and white and perfect, and god, whatever progress she’d thought she’d made obliterates, blasts into a thousand pieces she doesn’t think she could ever pick up. She wants to kiss him. She wants to step over the threshold and pull his face down to hers and kiss him.

“You remembered.”

“I remember everything.”

It's meant to be a joke, but it sounds too serious—and suddenly everything’s flashing before her eyes. Rolling over and waking up from camping last summer, how he was already watching her, eyes still hazy and thick with sleep in the dewy morning. The feel of his hand on her thigh that first time he’d kissed her, firm and heavy. The sound of his laughter every time she made a corny joke. And then—the last time she saw him. It comes flooding back. How his hands trembled just enough to be noticeable when he unbuttoned her pajama top. How he kissed away the tear on her cheek. How she’d never felt so good or warm or safe—even when it felt like she was falling apart.

Rio’s looking at her like he remembers too, like he might say something—but at the last second, his tongue darts out across his lip and instead he teases, “So you’re still the same know-it-all you always were, huh?”

“Of course. That’s what you like about me, isn’t it?” she says with a crooked grin. 

Rio laughs. “You’re real full of yourself, you know that?”

“Yeah, but you like that too,” she says, and she remembers how it tipped her off, confirmed what she’d suspected: _It’s just the way you carry yourself—confident. Like you don’t give a shit what other people think. Like you know who you are._ “Are you going to let me in?”

Jaw tight, Rio glances over his shoulder and for a horrible second, Beth wonders if he’s _not_ alone. But then he steps aside and says, “Yeah, ‘course. C’mon.”

When she passes him, he steps back, giving her space. Beth blinks, and he gestures her ahead of him. Just like the first time, she thinks, when he let her lead the way to his bedroom. 

Stepping inside, she immediately notices that it looks basically the same. All the furniture’s in the same spot. His shoes are neatly lined up on his shoe rack in the open closet, his button-ups arranged in color-coded order on his hanger. He’d replaced the broken propeller on his model plane—or maybe it was a new plane entirely, she wasn’t sure. 

He watches her take it all in like it’s a museum, a preservation of _before._

Well, mostly. 

“You got a new comforter,” she notes, running her hand across the gray and blue striped blanket. It’s softer than what he used to have. 

She glances over her shoulder and he’s behind her, leaning against the door frame, still observing. 

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want a twin bed anymore, but mattresses and frames are expensive so... Ma bought me a new bedspread instead.”

Under her breath, Beth laughs. “Sounds like a good compromise.”

“Yeah. Really met me in the middle on that one.”

“Does she know you, like, barely fit on this thing? That your feet are practically dangling off the edge?”

She’d always had to lie practically on top of him just for both of them to squeeze onto the mattress together—not that either of them had minded. It’d felt like a reward for getting through the whole week apart. She wonders if he's thinking about it too.

Grinning, Rio scratches his chin. “How’s Annie?”

Beck cocks her head, studying him. It wasn’t like he’d _never_ asked after Annie. It’s just—

She shrugs. 

“Fine. Good. She likes her new school. Playground’s bigger, so you know... she’s happy.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the most important thing when you’re seven, huh?”

“Well, that and the color of your backpack.”

“She finally get the Ninja Turtles?”

Beth nods, lips twitching up. She wasn’t the only one who remembered everything. 

After a beat, Rio asks, "And you?”

“Did I finally get a Ninja Turtles backpack?” Beth teases. She settles on his bed, presses back against the wall so that her daisy Keds hang off the edge. 

“How’s Ann Arbor?” Rio clarifies, skating past her dumb joke. “Do you—like it?”

Beth fiddles with the ties on her hoodie, trying to figure out how to answer. It wasn’t all bad. She had Ruby. And her new school had a Cooking class that she liked. Her coworkers at Dairy Queen were nice, and she got a free Blizzard at the end of every shift. But—

“I miss Detroit,” she admits, looking up at him. 

He’s so far away, still on the other end of the room, but she sees his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows thickly, and she knows he knows what she meant.

“Detroit misses you too.”

Something in her loosens. 

She’d—wondered, that’s all. 

“Enough to come sit by me and stop acting weird?” she tries.

Because he _is_ being weird. He’s looking at her like he can’t believe she’s real, like he’s scared to get too close, and it makes her nervous. 

Had they lost it, this unnameable thing they had?

Had too much time passed?

But Rio launches off the doorframe and Beth’s heart lurches in her throat. And then he sits beside her on the bed, a solid foot separating them from touching—and it’s worse. So much worse. 

She looks sharply away from him, gaze settling on his alarm clock.

Outside, she can hear the squeaking springs of the neighbor kids jumping on a trampoline, the hiss of a sprinkler in the lawn, and the dull jingle of an ice cream truck making its last rounds of the season. 

"Will Lola be home from dance soon?” 

“No.”

“Oh.”

“She’s got a boyfriend. Spends a lot of time over there now,” he explains. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his fingers twitch against his knee. She wants to reach out and steady him. Instead, she tugs on the jacket strings again so that on her shoulders, the hood scrunches up. 

“Is he nice?”

“Nah, he’s kind of a dick.”

Beth whips around to look back at him, surprised. “Really?”

“Yeah, it’s why they like each other so much.”

She shouldn’t, but Beth laughs—and then she shoves at him. “You’re awful.”

Rio grins, mischievous, and he catches her wrist in his fingers. Her skin blazes under his touch. For a second, they lock eyes. Then, abruptly, like he’s been burned, Rio drops her hand and runs his own over his cropped hair. Beth presses her fingers to her lips. 

She had spent the bus ride imagining a million different ways this might’ve gone but—

This wasn’t one of them.

He wasn’t being rude or dismissive or disinterested—he was just… _polite._ She didn’t want polite. She wanted _Rio._

This wasn’t how the poem went. 

She’d thought—

She’d thought it meant _forever._

“How’s soccer?” she asks because the silence is unbearable. When did it become hard to talk to him? She doesn’t remember it ever feeling like this before. And she can’t pinpoint it, what’s shifted between them, because his eyes still sparkled when he looked at her, but he acted like if he got too close to her he might get shocked. 

“‘S good. Made Varsity this year. Starter.” 

“Seriously?” Her face blooms into a smile despite the fact that it feels like her throat is constricting. 

He rolls his shoulders and clears his throat. “Thanks for makin’ me stick with it.”

“It was important.”

_Nothing’s more important to me than you._

He’d said that once. It hadn’t been that long ago. Or at least it didn’t feel that way. Not to her. But maybe he’d succeeded where she’d failed—maybe he’d forgotten about her.

“I’m sorry I didn’t—” she sucks in a breath, flailing out a hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

Nodding, he absorbs this. At first, she’s not sure if he’s going to say anything—or if he does, she half-expects him to offer up some non-sequitur like he had when he’d changed the topic to Annie. 

But then instead he says, voice quieter than it’d been before: “Why didn’t you?”

Beth turns toward him, but she can’t meet his eye. Instead, she watches as he twists his bracelets, making sure they’re perfectly even, ties on the inside of his wrist. She used to do it for him while they laid together in bed. He’d always say, “Why you doin’ that? They’re just gonna spin around anyway,” but she’d said, “Because I like it,” and he’d laugh at her and call her neurotic before pressing a kiss to the top of her head. 

Now he’d taken over the habit.

“I wanted to,” she admits softly. 

Rio moves his hand off his thigh, towards her, like maybe he’s going to reach for her—but then he abruptly switches course, scratching at his earlobe instead.

“‘S a’ight,” he tells her. 

“Is it?”

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean—” She shakes her head. “Why won’t you touch me?” Her voice cracks and she coughs to try and cover it up. 

Rio pushes his tongue along his bottom lip, pushing it out in agitation. “I shouldn’t.”

“Didn’t ask if you should,” she says bitterly, the words slipping out in an imitation of that first night she’d snuck into his room before she can think better of it. 

“Elizabeth.”

“It’s fine—I just—I thought—” She can feel the prick of tears at the corner of her eyes.

“Elizabeth—”

“I still—But you don't—" She can't finish her setences. Can't name it out loud. Can't make it true by putting it into words. "That's fine—”

“Darlin’,” he interrupts her, “I do.”

Sucking in a breath, Beth forces herself to look at him. Properly. His eyes are dark, dark brown—almost black—but not. More like the chocolate oozing out of a lava cake, or a log smoldering on a fire on a cold night—something that could warm her up from the inside out. She surveys the rest of his face. It takes everything in her not to reach out and press the pad of her finger against his heart-shaped freckle, to run her thumb across his moistened bottom lip. 

“You do?”

The movement’s so minuscule it’s almost impossible to spot, but he tips his chin just enough to say _yes._

“Then why—?”

“‘Cause,” he says, but his voice is rough like he’s forcing the words out of his mouth. “If I start, I ain’t gonna be able to stop.”

“So don’t,” she says, and she reaches for his hand. Puts hers on top. When she grazes her thumb over the soft—so soft—skin on the back of his hands, Rio briefly closes his eyes. “I was stupid before—but—” 

She stops herself abruptly, digging her free hand into her pocket and pulling out a piece of paper—folded up elaborately like she’d used to do with the notes she’d shove into his locker. Rio reaches for it so that her hand falls back to the bed.

When he unfolds it, the poem, the page isn’t blank anymore. She’d doodled in the margins on the bus ride—then added her own note at the bottom: _I can’t stop thinking about you._

Rio’s perfectly still.

She licks her lips.

“I carry your heart,” he says finally, tapping his pointer finger along the first line of the poem. 

“Do you—”

“I remember,” he says, but it sounds more like _I can’t forget._

“We were going to read it in class today and instead I just—I got up and came straight here. I just walked out and I came here because I needed—”

“Elizabeth—”

“—to see you—”

“Elizabeth—”

“—and I know that there are a million reasons that it shouldn't work but—”

 _“Elizabeth,”_ he interjects with conviction this time. He seems surprised to have finally hooked her attention, and when she gives it to him, blood running cold at his tone, he looks away. Following his gaze to that model plane on his desk, she suddenly she realizes it _is_ new. The last one, it had circles on the wings. This one has crosses. How had she missed that before? She's been in his room a million times. She should know every last detail. She should be able to spot the difference. 

But she hadn't been willing to really see it, had she?

She knows what he’s going to say before he says it, but she doesn’t stop him.

“I... have a girlfriend.”

“Oh."

His jaw rocks. 

She needs to get up. She needs to feel the ground under her feet, needs to get off this _bed._ She feels like a deracinated tree, like her nerves are exposed roots ripped out of the earth she’d been burrowed in. When Beth wills herself to stand, though, nothing happens.

“What’s her name?” 

“Rhea.”

“Rhea,” she repeats. “Pretty name.” It sounded nice paired against his, she thought.

“Fuck, I didn’t—”

“Is she nice?”

Rio nods once.

“Good,” Beth says, and she could hide it from someone else, she thinks, but not him. A single tear escapes. “You should be with someone nice.”

He doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. When she turns her head, she notices that they’ve both leaned towards each other against the wall. There’s only an inch between their shoulders now.

“I should go.”

“Okay,” Rio agrees, but it’s quiet. Reluctant.

All of the sudden, she feels very tired. 

“Maybe we could just sit here for a minute, though?”

“Maybe we could.”

She leans her head on his shoulder, and he puts his arm around her, and they don’t say anything but there’s not much to say anyway. There’s only the sound of his breathing, of the house settling, of her heart breaking.

* * *

She donates _1984_ to the school library. Drops the note in a recycle bin at school. The next time money’s tight, she has Ruby drive her to the pawn shop. The owner takes a magnifying glass to the necklace, scrutinizing it with squinted eyes. 

Beth reorganizes a display case of rings while she waits, pairing like-colors together and then ordering them by size from top to bottom. Ruby laughs at her.

“Neurotic much?” she asks.

Beth blinks. 

The owner offers her a fair price—more than she’d bargained for anyway, but she shakes her head.

“You won’t get more than this,” the owner promises, holding the necklace out over the counter so that it pendulums back and forth in front of her.

“That’s okay,” Beth says, reaching out to grab it. She unhooks the clasp, rehooking it around her neck. “I’m going to keep it.”

She thinks of Rio twisting the bracelets on his wrist, picking up her habit, making it his own.

Maybe she couldn’t keep everything. But some things, she thought—some things were important enough to keep carrying. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the e.e. cummings poem references in the text.
> 
> _i carry your heart with me(i carry it in  
>  my heart)i am never without it(anywhere  
> i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done  
> by only me is your doing,my darling)  
> i fear  
> no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want  
> no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)  
> and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant  
> and whatever a sun will always sing is you_
> 
> _here is the deepest secret nobody knows  
>  (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud  
> and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows  
> higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)  
> and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart_
> 
> _i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)_


End file.
